For anyone unaware, when you go to a typical LAN party one of the things you need to bring along with your PC is an ethernet cable. The length of the cable depends on where your seat is and where the switch is located but most events just recommend bringing a 25-foot cable. Any cable will get the job done but you want to be able to spot it and you want to be able to pack it up quickly when the event is over. For me I use bring orange cables for both my wife and I so they stand out at the switch and then I just use Velcro cable wraps on the cable to keep it all bundled up. This gets the job done and helps maintain my cable, but it isn’t the fastest to pack up at the end. I do have to take my time winding it up to prevent damage and to make sure next LAN I don’t have a mess. Well a while back a good friend of ours Matt who you might know better as Vector from PDXLAN introduced me to Nick aka Vaelin who has been to PDX events from the beginning. Long story short, he has designed a solution to all of this in what he calls the LanReel. It is a 25-foot network cable that can quickly be spooled back up and packed away in your LANbag. He sent one over and I’ve been playing with it for a little while now, today I wanted to talk a little more about it and show everyone what it is all about.

Over the past 10 years having wireless access in your home has gone from being nice to have to basically a requirement if you have internet. Of course wireless has been around longer than that, but just looking recently with the growth of mobile devices, tablets, laptops, and smart home devices it used to be just a few devices in a home where now it is easy for a family to have 20 or more devices connected without getting into smart home devices. It's amazing how quickly even a good router or access point can get over loaded with that number of devices on them, not to mention just being able to get a signal in all of the corners of the house. I live in an older house, combine that with a very high number of PCs and electronic devices, the wireless range in my house is really bad. I upgraded years ago from a basic router to a PF Sense setup and recently I added a long range wireless AC access point. Well at CES this past year mesh networks were all the rage and TP-Link seems to be one of the first out with their Deco Mesh Wi-Fi system. Today I’m going to see what they are all about and then do some in depth testing, comparing a mesh setup with one long range access point. I’m excited to see what is going to give me better coverage and better speed in all of the rooms in our household.

When it comes to networking nearly all of the companies that come to mind have been around for what seems like forever. It is rare to see new companies bust into the market. Well recently a new company called Tenda reached out to me about covering their latest router. I found out when researching them that Tenda has actually been around for 16 years, even though their name isn’t exactly a household name. The AC15 router that they wanted me to check out caught my eye though and I figured I would see what Tenda has to offer and find out if their new AC1900 router has what it takes to be the router you go with when moving to Wireless AC.

While a lot of us still run wired networks at home, you really can’t avoid running a wireless network in your home or office. There are just to many devices that only use wireless like mobile phones, tablets, portable game consoles, and a lot of today’s thin laptops as well. Hell in our house in addition to the regular devices you will also see a printer, at least one IP security camera, and even our whole house humidifier. This is all of course in a house that is completely wired as well, imagine how many devices you might see on a house that runs completely on wireless. With that the move to wireless AC becomes more and more important. The additional bandwidth it allows on wireless is huge, especially when a lot of households are actually getting faster internet than their wireless can provide to their devices. So today I’m going to take a look at a wireless AC adapter from Netis that allows you to hook up that PC all the way on the top floor to your new AC router or if you want you can even use it to run your own wireless network.

Recently we have done a few reviews on the emerging wireless AC technology but up until now those reviews have been limited to routers which merely allow access. Today we take a look at what may be one of the fastest ways to utilize your new wireless AC connection.  The USB-AC56 from Asus is a dual-band network adapter meant to allow you to tap into the 5GHz band and only requires the use of a single USB3 connection. Will the AC56 prove to be your quickest solution to the fastest wireless speeds available or will it be better to search for other options? We’ll find out.

The home network is one of the most consistently neglected things in modern computing, usually relegated to the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” category even by most enthusiasts. However, it is also a market with constantly evolving technologies just like everything else and in the current landscape of always online games and every phone and gadget starving for wireless data why wouldn’t you want a network you can rely on? Earlier we reviewed My Net AC1300 from Western Digital and today we are back to put the ASUS RT-AC56U through the same paces. Is wireless AC technology all it’s cracked up to be? We will soon find out.

When it comes to enthusiasts we put a lot of thought into the parts we put in our PC, but don’t often think about what connects us to the internet. Most people will grab any old router from a brick and mortar store that suits their needs. I feel that more information should be acquired, especially for something that is only purchased once in a blue moon. Will the router suit my needs? Will it suit my needs long term?  Will it continue to hold up as the technology improves? All of these questions and more will be considered while looking at the Western Digital My Net AC 1300.

We have all run into the issue at one point or another, you are running on Wi-Fi and you have a perfect signal all the way until you get to where you need to be and BAM nothing. I run into this issue when trying to work at the back of my house on the patio as well as in my bathroom. This prevents me from streaming music in the bathroom when needed and from working outside on nice days. A big portion of this is the placement of my router, but due to where my cable is installed it’s not really an easy fix. When I heard about EDIMAX’s new Wi-Fi extender, I was excited that I might have finally found an easy fix. Let’s take a look at what it’s all about and see if it was able to take care of our problem!

Nearly five years ago when we hosted our first LAN party we had no idea what to expect or any idea on how much it would grow in the future. Research online as far as what other LAN’s were using was one of the most helpful things. Because of that, as we prep for our 10^th event I wanted to give everyone a look behind the scenes at our network. This should help give you an idea of what to start with if you plan on growing in the future.

If you've been an avid reader of LanOC Reviews, the name Killer 2100 should be somewhat familiar. And if you follow hardware news and press releases, then you're probably as excited about this review as we are. Maybe it's because we've been the victims of automatic updates killing in-game performance too many times, or perhaps it's the idea of being able to control and prioritize applications that appeals so much to us as LAN party hosts. Whatever the reason, we've been covering BigFoot Networks and their Killer cards for quite some time now, anxiously awaiting our chance to try one out for ourselves. With the launch of the new Killer 2100 card, we finally received one to put to the LanOC test.

Bigfoot Networks is no stranger to LanOC Reviews, having the chance to personally speak with them on a number of occasions. If you're not familiar with the company, very simply BFN is a company dedicated to help reduce your lag in online gaming with their line of network cards. The Killer technology has been on the market for a while now, and BFN has been developing and enhancing their products to better fight network latency. Bigfoot has given us the oppurtunity to get a first-look at their new product, the Killer 2100 Network Card.

Before we packed up for CES this year I had the pleasure/luck of talking with Verizon about reviewing a few of their current and upcoming products. With CES now over I couldn't help but jump at the chance to try out the MiFi. With a whole group of us traveling around Vegas the MiFi would be perfect for helping us get the most current updates posted for everyone to read. Now that we are back to work catching up with all of our reviews, I finally have a chance to talk about my experience with it.

The widespread use of laptops in today’s on the go lifestyle has accelerated the use of external storage due to the smaller hard drive space in laptops. With a lot of homes having more than one computer, you now have people looking for easy ways to share there files between computers. Most of the time this means you are unplugging your external and plugging it into other computers. TRITTON has produced the USB Sharenet for people who have this problem. Considering in our household we have 4 people online and sharing files at any given time this product is perfect for us, if it works the way its described. Click to find out how it worked for us.